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Museum collections

John McDade, the Smokies' curator, organizes the park's archival history.

NPS photo.

Under the Sugarlands Visitor Center are some of the keys to the park’s past. This time, we’re not talking about artifacts buried underground, but rather park archives in the Sugarlands basement. In climate-controlled, dry rooms are hundreds of drawers holding a wealth of Smoky Mountain culture: letters, photographs, newspaper articles, proclamations, and oral histories telling the story of the park’s people and places.

To see (and hold) 3-D pieces of the Smokies history, you’d have to travel farther afield. Most of the large physical artifacts—household goods representing Southern Appalachian lifestyles, for example, and fragments of prehistoric pottery—are housed in Oak Ridge, TN at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Technical Information, or OSTI for short. Eventually, the park hopes to bring all of the collections at these two sites together as research and education tools.

The new curator of these cultural archives is John McDade, who has worked in several museums, and most recently at Acadia National Park in Maine before coming to the Great Smoky Mountains. Being a curator in a park as large and culturally rich as the Smokies is a huge job, so John is already busy improving safe, archival storage systems, sorting historic materials, and preparing for new exhibits that will be in the Visitor Center the park is building at its southern Oconaluftee entrance.